The other item in the pile is safer, an exhibition brochure for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It looks old, the paper fingerprinted and thin. I’m not sure why it’s in the stack—maybe a souvenir from when Mom worked there—until I skim the section on special exhibitions. There’s a bit about a Masters of Fantasy show, the collected works of artists who “explored the worlds of the imagination, the inner reality of the subconscious, and of dream.”
Above the caption is a shot of the exhibit.
“You’re not listening to me, are you?” Jessa objects.
Had she been talking? “Yeah, okay, whatever. But first I need to see something.”
Lindy is out when I get home. I knew she would be. She left a message on my phone that she had errands to run, and encouraged me to take a break from my marathon hangout with Jessa and stop home. Encouragement to the tune of “Imogene Scott, if you aren’t sitting across the kitchen table from me in the next twenty-four hours, you’ll be eating every lunch for the entirety of February break in my office at work.”
Lindy’s always given me my space, but I’m beginning to suspect she’s losing patience.
It’s just as well she isn’t here; it would feel wrong to walk unapologetically into Dad’s office with my stepmother around. Settling into his rolling chair, I turn on his computer and reach into my bag while I wait for it to boot up. My knuckles scrape against the rough rind of the stone heart. But it’s not what I’m after, and I dig deeper.
I punch in the password, wondering if Dad meant it to represent Miles Faye, or my mother. I make up my mind when the desktop brightens and floods with the familiar background. I never paid much attention to the picture. Each time I snuck on to Dad’s computer, I was rushing against the clock. Now that I’m squinting at it with my face inches from the screen, I see the details of the painting. There aren’t many—it looks like a watercolor and ink done in gray, and it’s all pretty fluid. Black scrawls for clouds, a slightly grayer wash to separate the rain-scratched sky from steely seas. Men in flat-bottomed wooden boats haul up fishing nets, robes billowing in what must be a strong, dark wind. Inside the scribbled nets, the shapes of fish like small sea monsters.
Pulling out the old Boston MFA brochure, I open it to the prints and drawings section and flatten it on top of Dad’s desk calendar. There it is: the young woman examining a framed work of art on the wall, awe in her eyes. It’s a gray picture of men in little wooden boats hauling up full-to-bursting fishing nets before the storm hits.
The young woman in the picture is my mother.
I have a stone heart, a scrappy backyard in Fitchburg where my mother used to draw monsters, a Western Union in Connecticut, a twentieth anniversary, and now this: an inky sketch of fishermen. I don’t know what it adds up to, but I know it leads somewhere. And how do I know that?
Faith. In Dad, and in mysteries.
I’m floating so high on that hope that when Jessa calls, I forget how awkward and uncontrollable parties can be, especially parties with boys, and tell her sure, I’ll come over, I’ll come hang out with Chad and the soccer team, count me in.
By the time Jessa and I descend into the Prices’ basement, the sort-of-party is under way.
On a pair of beanbag chairs in front of the TV, Chad and his old teammate Omar Wolcott lean into their Wii Wheels as they steer Bowser and Wario across the rickety bridges of Shy Guy Falls.
At the Ping-Pong table, Jeremy slaps a ball across the net to Mike Wazchowitz, who whiffs it. Jeremy gives Jessa a head-jerk nod while Mike scrambles around for the ball under Chad’s plaid blanketed pullout bed.
Down on the floor, Omar does a cramped victory dance, constricted by his beanbag. Chad drops his controller, groans, turns, and sees us. He blinks, and I swear so does the silly, bloody muscle in my chest.
“Look at you, Imogene,” he says.
I blush and tug down my dress. “Yeah, look at me.”
I had a pretty specific idea of what I wanted to wear tonight, but nothing right in my closet, so after walking to Jessa’s through a cold, spattering rain, I borrowed from her: a minidress with swirls of lace over a silver slip. Because it was “retro,” according to Jessa, tight on top and sort of triangled out at the bottom, the loose fit in the waist and hips meant I could wedge myself in. The hem of it barely reached my palms when I held my arms straight for inspection, so Jessa gave me a pair of thick pink tights. She was thrilled I was letting her play life-size Barbie for a simple basement party, and never asked the reason. It’s not that I don’t like makeup and heels, or girls who wear makeup and heels. I’m on board with third-wave feminism and whatever. It’s just, it feels as if girls like Jessa, women like Lindy, had some kind of how-to-be-pretty handbook passed to them that was never passed to me. True, Dr. Van Tassel couldn’t teach Jessa about dresses and mascara any more than Dad could teach me. But I remember the afternoon she enlisted her glamorous sister, Annette, who works for some glittery boutique on Newbury Street. She arrived with armfuls of Cosmo, a caboodle of lipstick. “Red lipstick can be ladylike,” she said once Dr. Van Tassel had fled Jessa’s bedroom, “but it can also be a great ‘Fuck you, world!’” I left before the lesson began; Dad was taking me to the Friendly Toast that night.
Then there was Mrs. Patel, who let us try on makeup at her daughter Lavender’s twelfth birthday sleepover. Perched on the rim of the Patels’ Jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom, we passed around jeweled eye shadows and disks of blush and lip glosses like tubes of cake icing. The next morning, our cotton pillowcases were like pale faces, imprinted with red lips, violet eyelids, rosy cheeks. When I turned mine over for washing, Dad, who was in a rare mood, laughed and called me Madam de la Scott for the rest of the day. Would Madam de la Scott desire her juice in le plastic cup or in le crystal champagne flute?
In eighth grade Mrs. Botstein took a little group of us shopping before Danica’s bat mitzvah, and though Danica’s the kind of girl pained by a teacher’s attention, under her mother’s spotlight she glowed. “Try these boots,” Mrs. Botstein said. “Oh, look at this! What about this blazer? Look at my daughter,” she said, stepping back. “Isn’t she just blossoming?” At which Danica blushed and the rest of the girls giggled, but I didn’t.
Mrs. Tuzzi with her yoga body is only a size up from Katie, both of them short and small-boned with doll feet, and they switch off jackets and shoes with the speed of a pit crew changing tires at the Indy 500.
Ms. Nelson gave Shalmar her wedding necklace to wear to junior prom. Shalmar fingered the crooked pink pearls while we stood by the punch bowl, her nose so high in the air she’d have been the first to die in a fire.
Last Thursday, for Valentine’s Day, Mrs. Rivers gave Jaime a school ring that belonged to her own mother, who’d died of breast cancer when Jaime was seven.
I don’t like how it makes me feel to think of these things.
But I’m grateful for one thing: at least I have Jessa, and she has the manual dexterity of a stylist. I described to Jessa the exact updo I wanted, and asked for an eighties-style pink lip, which I do not wear. I sat at the little silk-covered bench at her vanity as she fiddled with my slippery, winter-static hair, leaning my head back into her hands and telling Jessa about the brochure.
“Huh. Fishes. So what next?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking of going to the museum?”
“Cool. This is kind of exciting, right?” She scraped the last bobby pin over my scalp and cradled my chin with light fingers to do my lipstick.
“Exciting?” I mumbled open-mouthed.
“Yeah. Like, not that we don’t know where your dad is. But looking for him and following clues and stuff? It’s like we’re really doing something.”
“I guess I know what you mean.”
“So do you want to do this stuff when you grow up?”
“When I grow up?”
“Or whatever, say you went to BU and you graduated and got a dog and now you’re thirty and fabulous. What are you doing?”
I squinted as she tugged back the hair at my temples. Normally I’d give Jessa the line I use on Mr. McCormick, and Lindy, and whoever reads our self-important college application essays: I want to write great mysteries. But that’s not really true. It’s not whodunits of my own making that I want to solve; it’s the mystery I’ve been waiting and reading and preparing all my life to unravel. Rather than spill my hopes and dreams all over Jessa, I dodged the question. “Who says I want to go to BU? It’s enormous. I still get lost at Sugarbrook High sometimes, and that’s just a big horseshoe. And I’d maybe run into Jeremy.”
“He’s not that bad,” she insisted, not for the first time.
“Okay, so where do you want to go to college?”
“I want to go to RISD. They have all these computer art programs. Like graphic design?”
That made sense. Jessa liked art class best of all, was really good at it, and any job that required competence with a keyboard, she’d kill at.
“But I’ll probably only get into, like, Quinsigamond Community College. I’m not like Chadwick.”
“So he’s smart? You’re smart, Jessa.”
“Pshh.”
“You are! You’re a better liar than me, right? So maybe you should be the writer.”
“Or I should be a powerful fucking wizard. Voilà!”
I turned to face the mirror for Jessa’s big reveal. The hair was right—a poofed-up kind of French twist in the back, with two thick braids wrapped around the crown of my head. Jessa can do anything with hair. And with the bright pink lips and a slick of liquid eyeliner, I looked . . . not exactly like the girl in the prom photo, with her curtained silver dress and braided French twist and winged eyeliner, but not unlike her either. The awkwardness of my elbows and knees helped as I tried to figure out what to do with my body. And my face really was shaped like hers—you could see it when our hair was up like this.
Jessa popped into the mirror behind me. “Hot! Chadwick’s gonna want to rip your tights off like wrapping paper.”
“Oh, whatever,” I said, and then, “Doesn’t he have that girlfriend, anyway? I thought he was still dating that girl. The ski instructor. That he brought home for Thanksgiving?”
She shrugged mysteriously and finger-combed her own hair. “Not that I know of.”
It turns out there aren’t any college girls or ski instructors at the party, but then there aren’t usually, and calling it a party is pretty generous. What it is, is a collection of Doritos bags, KFC buckets, beer bottles, and boys. Still, I know girls who would wear uncooked sausage links to this gathering of snack foods if it meant they could come. Soccer is big at Sugarbrook, and Chad, Omar, Jeremy, and Mike led the team to States, which made them übermensches. I mean, Chad was kind of a nerd off the field—all AP classes, the hardest science and math courses Sugarbrook offered, and a member of the tech club off-season. But I once saw Jaime Rivers fish his Slurpee straw out of the cafeteria trash and carry it around in her pencil case because it’d touched his lips.
Chad levers himself up with much squeaking of vinyl and shifting of beans. Clearly he did not spend an hour and a half agonizing over his outfit; he’s wearing generic dark boy-jeans (wearing them well) and a white T-shirt with a huge blue jellyfish pumping across the front, a bowl trailing ribbons and clouds. On the back it reads Rhizostome or Die. His hair stands in damp spikes from a recent shower, paler blond under the basement fluorescents like a tangled halo.
Jeez.
He lopes over to us, then joins us by the mini fridge. On top is a small collection of liquor bottles and soda bottles, some of which he mixes into a red Solo cup while I relearn the freckles on his biceps I’ve spent summer days memorizing.
Jessa drives an elbow into my hip before heading for the Ping-Pong table.
“What are you drinking?” I ask. So clever.
“Just a Captain and Coke. Kind of heavy on the Captain.” He hands it to me to taste, and our fingers brush. “You’d like it.”
I take a long sip of it, sweet and syrupy and throat-burning.
He snatches it back. “When you’re a grown-up like me. Stick with beer and gather ye rosebuds while ye may, youth.”
“I’m not that youthful. You’re not that old.”
“You are,” he says, laughing, “one year and four months younger than me. That’s more than the lifespan of the brine shrimp. That’s, like, one brine shrimp and one dragonfly. That’s fifteen bees younger! And there’s this mayfly—”
“It lives for an hour, right? It has no mouth and no digestive system and it’s made to have sex and die.” I stifle the urge to crack my knuckles. “Just like college boys.”
The dimple in his left cheek appears. “So you watch Animal Planet. So what? Young people watch Animal Planet.”
“Not many.”
“You’re still . . . 10,958 mayflies too young for the Captain.” Then, squaring himself to me—the toes of his socks inches from my mine, his dimples at eye level, and his green eyes warming my face—he places his palm on top of my head, measuring. He lifts it and hovers it just above, so I can still feel my hair catching on his callused skin. My whole scalp tingles.
Chad grins. “Must be this tall to ride.”
“Ride what, Chadwick?” Jessa squeezes past us, Jeremy on her heels. She looks cool and slick in a long white tank top and electric-blue leggings, and Mike Wazchowitz misses an easy volley at the Ping-Pong table when she bends over to look in the fridge.
Clearing his throat, Chad turns on her, blushing to the bright blond roots of his hair. “Mind your business, Jenessa.” He stalks off and plops back in the beanbag with his drink.
As Jeremy pours two cups, she twists her hair into a red-gold rope, then releases it, the strands winding apart, spreading out, shining. Her smile is a white slice in the dim basement.
Jeremy hands her the drink and asks what I want.
“Captain and Coke, please.”
He lifts both eyebrows.
This is the point in the evening where I’d usually pick a spot and commence leaning against the wall with a beer and a powdery handful of Doritos until Jessa swept Jeremy up and away to the Damon Salvatore side of the bed. Then I’d retreat to the snowy quiet of outside and walk the ten minutes home alone, safely feeling my feelings. But I did come dressed to kill, so instead of doing that, I take my drink and sit on Chad’s bed to watch the Ping-Pong game. I decide to fake it till I make it. (This is one of Lindy’s big Tips for a Happier, Healthier Family. “Positive action can open the door to positive feelings,” she would say. “Put your sneakers on instead of your slippers, your jacket instead of your bathrobe.” On Dad’s first real date with Lindy, he wore his tux.)
Even though I don’t especially care about the Ping-Pong match, and I suspect the guys don’t especially care if I care, I root Jeremy and Mike on in turn. They aren’t terrible, and the more I sip my Captain and Coke, which tastes stronger than Chad’s, the more intense the game seems, the funnier the ambitiously failed swings, the more dazzling Jessa and Jeremy are, with his hand in her back pocket, her breast on his biceps, their mouths darting together and flitting apart like dragonflies (nearly four of which I am younger than Chad). After my second cup, handed to me by Mike on his way back from the mini fridge, I think I’m doing a pretty good job of making it.
When I’m quiet and still for too long at parties, I start looking for ways to slip out—I have that in common with Dad—but tonight, I’m committed. So when that starts, I leave the bed to watch Chad and Omar play Mario Kart. They offer me a controller, and Chad smiles over his shoulder at me during a break in the action. Though my eyes are zooming in and out of focus a bit, I’m hotly aware of his teeth, very white, and my own teeth, marginally dull from childhood braces. I bet the Prices brush their perfect teeth with bottled water when I’m not around to shame them into using the tap. Did I brush my teeth before the party? Do I have lipstick on my teeth? Does my breath smell like Doritos? Does Chad’s? No—when I lean in toward the TV, h
e smells like boy. Like plaid flannel sheets and spicy deodorant and socks that aren’t unclean, per se, but might’ve been hibernating under the bed for a week before he found them and pulled them on, because socks are socks to a guy like Chad. I respect that. I funnel my third drink into my mouth during a break in the game to stop myself from leaning in farther and whispering something “witty” about socks into his perfect seashell ear. He lists heavily to the left as he tries to make a hairpin turn around a penguin, then winces as the unstoppable Wario and immovable penguin collide nonetheless. I like the way he tries to steer with his whole body. I like the way he flinches when he crashes, as if in actual, 3D pain. I like the way he exists—another thought I close my lips around to keep from whispering.
Jessa unravels from Jeremy and drops down on the rug beside me. “I’m glad you’re having fun, Im,” she coos, her syllables dragging slightly.
When Omar loses for the sixth (sixteenth?) time, he suggests we play kings, which I’ll later remember in flashes:
Jessa pulling nine, make a rhyme, surprising us all with a win by rhyming “telescope” with “artichoke.”
Chad insisting we girls stick to beer, but being a little too far gone himself to check our cups closely.
Mike drawing eight, invent a rule, after which Jeremy has to sip every time anyone shouts, “Douchebags drink!”
Chad, his comet-white teeth and his deep, rumbly voice.
Jessa linking her arm through the hot crook of my elbow, and me feeling so good that I let her.
Me, pulling the fourth and final king. Omar hands me the center cup, where a mixture of Sam Adams and Captain and Coke and at least a little tequila and who knows what else swirls in one dangerous mud-brown brew. “Guys, no way, no way,” Chad says, and tries to relieve me of the cup.
“Let her do it, Chad,” Jeremy says. “She needs a good time right now, you know?”
Chad asks us what he means.
The Mystery of Hollow Places Page 9